There is an interesting letter Tolkien wrote to his American publishers, the Houghton Mifflin Company, in June 1955 which has not been mentioned here yet. It is letter 165, and is, of course, subject to the usual caveats (or those I would make, at any rate), about how authors construct their origins.
Quote:
I am in fact far more of a Suffield (a family deriving from Evesham in Worcestershire), and it is to my mother who taught me (until I obtained a scholarship at the ancient Grammar School in Birmingham) that I owe my tastes for philology, especially of Germanic languages, and for romance, I am indeed in English terms a West-midlander at home only in the counties upon the Welsh Marches; and it is, I believe, as much due to descent as to opportunity that Anglo-Saxon and Western Middle English and alliterative verse have been both a childhood attraction and my main professional sphere. (I also find the Welsh language specially attractive.) I write alliterative verse with pleasure,....
...I first set foot in 'Eire' in 1949 after The Lord of the Rings was finished, and find both Gaelic and the air of Ireland wholly alien--though the latter (not the language) is attractive.
...the remark about 'philology' was intended to allude to what is I think a primary 'fact' about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. The authorities of the university might well consider it an aberration of an elderly professor of philology to write and publish fairy stories and romances, and call it a 'hobby', pardonable because it has been (suprisingly to me as as much as to anyone) successful. But it is not a 'hobby' in the sense of something quite different from one's work, taken up as a relief-outlet. The invention of language is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the language than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows. I should have preferred to write in 'Elvish'. But, of course, such a work as The Lord of the Rings has been edited and only as much 'language' has been left in as I thought would be stomached by readers. (I now find that many would have liked more.) But there is a great deal of linguistic matter (other than actually 'elvish' names and words) included or mythologically expressed in the book. It is to me, anyway, largely an essay in 'linguistic aesthetic', as I sometimes say to people who ask me 'what is it all about?' It is not about anything but itself.
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Carpenter's introduction to the letter is quite amusing, presenting as it does Tolkien's exasperation with the reductive nature of the American journalist's questions to him. Apparently when asked what makes him tick, Tolkien replied, "I don't tick. I am not a machine."
Bethberry